We waited out the rain under Lever House surrounded by great art and one really bad trumpet player. It was the kind of summer downpour that proves New York tropical – sudden and violent and overwhelming in the power of both water and electricity – but it slowed the city only slightly, and the reflections multiplied the passions.

We started to walk again, south towards St. Bart's, and she said, "We're getting soaked." I looked down, an umbrella lay abandoned on the sidewalk. "This looks like what we need," I told her. And now she thought both I and the city were magic.

Ira Socol